Sunday, October 20, 2013

Gabrielle has been studying for her Permaculture Design
Course with Patrick Whitefield … online. I did
my own PDC back in 2004 with Patrick and Cathy at Ragman’s Lane farm in
the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire. It was residential, spread over two
weeks. Gabrielle had long wanted to do a PDC but there were several
difficulties. Two weeks is a long commitment to be away from our smallholding
and gîte business and residential courses are more costly as you’re paying for
accommodation on top of the course fees.

After much reflection, she had come to
the decision that it would be too difficult to arrange when we heard that
Patrick was just about to make his PDC available on the Internet. The course demands students complete five projects (four
design plus one other) to be assessed by Patrick.

Gabrielle has recently
finished the last project, unsurprisingly a design proposal (having worked
through base map, survey and client questionnaire). Patrick asked if we would
put her project online, so that other students could have the opportunity of
looking at it.

If you go to the horizontal menu at the top, on the right is
“Gabrielle’s PDC design”. Within that page are three links which, when you
click on them, will open up the document in a separate page, so you can view
her site survey, client questionnaire and design proposal in detail.